Ariel / Miranda / Antonia / Trinculo

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About Edward Hogg

This is Edward's first season at Shakespeare's Globe. Edward trained at RADA; since graduating in 2002, he has played the Fool in King Lear, Woyzeck in Woyzeck, and Hal in Loot. Edward has worked at many theatres including the Royal National Theatre, the Gate Theatre, Bristol Old Vic and the Nottingham Playhouse. You will also spot him in the films Alfie and Nicholas Nickleby. His television credits include Heartbeat, Beneath the Waves and The Bermuda Triangle.

Rehearsal Notes 1

These comments are the actor's thoughts or ideas about the part as s/he goes through the rehearsal process – they are simply his/her own interpretations and frequently change as the rehearsal process progresses.

Coming to the Globe

I was offered the part just before Christmas. Siobhan Bracke, the casting director at the Globe, asked me in to audition after she saw me in a play called Woyzeck at the Gate Theatre in Notting Hill. Mark [Rylance, Artistic Director] came to see it too, then I auditioned for The Tempest and they offered me the parts, which was brilliant! I’m playing Ariel, Miranda (woman), Antonio and Trinculo. I’ve done the play a couple of times, at college and at school, but I never played any of those parts. I like the play a lot, it's my favourite Shakespeare play – probably because it's the one I’ve done the most – but it's also quite scary for an actor… some characters’ impulses and ideas come far easier than others because they’re particularly funny or extreme. Ariel is very different. Whenever I’ve seen The Tempest, Trinculo's been my favourite character, but I don’t know if it’ll be my favourite part in this production. Anyway, I accepted that all that while ago and we started rehearsals on Monday. I was very nervous. I was even more nervous when I realised I was the only actor in the company who hadn’t actually worked here before (there's only three of us: me, Alex and Mark), but it was exciting too… Mark took us out on stage on the first day. I’d never stood on the stage before and you don’t realise quite how big and how open it is… it's amazing.

First day

Mark and Tim [Carroll, Master of Play] let us speak a bit on stage and run around; as they’ve got those two big pillars on the stage, it's useful to find out where you get blocked, and who can see and hear you when you stand in different places. We had a lovely first day just meeting everyone and at the end we did a blessing to the past spirits of the theatre. It was nice to put our hopes for the season together like that. On day two we dived straight into a read-through of the play and it's immediately clear what the big challenges of this production are going to be. We’re all playing several parts so we’ve got to identify where characters being played by the same person speak to one another and how we change between characters. For me as an actor it's super-exciting (I’m sure it is for Mark and Alex too) - initially these things will be problems but eventually they’ll be what make the production extraordinary. At least, I hope they will!

The idea is that we’re going to have three actors on the stage and six singers behind (in the gallery at the back of the stage). There are three dancers as well. The singers will represent the classical world and the middle stage will be the Jacobean world, that's where the actors are, and then there's the underworld or lower world which is where the audience stand – I think that's where the dancers will come from too, but they’ll move on and off stage at certain points (everything's still all up in the air; I don’t think anybody knows exactly how things will work yet!) There's a kind of union between the classical, the renaissance and the modern elements within the theatre.

During our sessions with Sian [Williams, Master of Dance], we started to explore how we might work with the dancers. Sian is choreographing movement for The Tempest. It's great to have dancers there who can move you from one position to another and manipulate your body. The play's so extreme and the characters are so extreme; the dancers can help make your movements very extreme too. You can do things like jump six feet in the air if they help lift you and you use your weight in a particular way – it gives you a wider variety of tools to use as a character.

Preparation

I was doing another play until last Saturday so I didn’t have time to do a lot of preparation for The Tempest. Also, it's very difficult to prepare for something like this because it's so different – not as though you have one character in a play where you know for sure what the theme is and where the play is set. I had no idea about those things for this production, so if I had done hours and hours of preparation it could easily have been for nothing. I read the play through a couple of times, and like I say, I knew it fairly well anyway. At least, I thought I knew it fairly well – when we started the read through earlier in the week, it was very apparent that I don’t know some of the scenes at all – the Lords’ scenes with Antonio, for example … I’d read them through but never really sat down and thought about them. I’ll be looking at it very closely over the next few weeks!

Ariel

Ariel is one of the three base characters: Caliban, Prospero and Ariel (we’re all playing other parts too). I’ve seen productions of The Tempest where Ariel is a kind of Mr. Incredible: ‘I do this, I do this! I can fly! I can swim, I can dance!’ When I auditioned for the part, Tim asked me to look at the idea that Ariel doesn’t actually want to do these things for Prospero; they’re not fun things for him to do. It's not fun for him to go and burn all over the ship. He doesn’t think ‘Oh it's such fun to be made to do these things by someone else’, but he does seem to love Prospero, if he can feel love. I think that Prospero loves Ariel (it's only my personal opinion) but I don’t think the relationship is a healthy one. Basically Prospero has freed Ariel from Sycorax's spell (she's a witch, Caliban's mother). She kept Ariel captive in a pine tree, and Prospero came and set him free. Now Prospero uses that as a bind; he somehow has control over Ariel. Ariel can only be free when Prospero says so – not a happy a situation.

I think it's pretty clear from the casting that the base characters are in some sense aspects of Prospero. Ariel is his imagination I suppose, an opposite for Caliban's baseness. Ariel is the mind, the imagination, and in that sense he's limitless; he can go anywhere and do anything, yet he's controlled by Prospero. He's under Prospero's spell and I think he's also intrigued by things that are human – he asks Prospero ‘do you love me?’ [IV.i] as though he maybe doesn’t understand emotions. That's why I think it's more interesting not to play him as though he's saying ‘I’m amazing and I did this, and I flamed and it was brilliant!’ when he tells Prospero about the tempest [I.ii]. He can do those things – that's just the way he is – so maybe he’d say those lines as a matter-of-fact and is really more puzzled about why he had to do all that: ‘I did this and I did that. I did it. It's done. So why did I have to do that?’

Movement

We had a movement session with Glynn [MacDonald, Master of movement] yesterday which was brilliant. She showed me some new things; I think she was going over the basics for me because I haven’t been here before whilst Alex and Mark are used to this kind of work. We were just stretching and loosening ourselves up, concentrating on the back and lumbar region, and then we looked at what the hands and eyes do in terms of gesture and story-telling. That's something I’m looking forward to developing; we’ll have these group movement sessions throughout the rehearsal period.

We spent most of the week reading through the play scene by scene: we read through, then stand up and do it and just see what happens – it's very basic this week, four days in! I just hope it all goes brilliantly and that the problems slowly start to become exciting opportunities rather than things to trip up over!

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Rehearsal Notes 2

These comments are the actor's thoughts or ideas about the part as s/he goes through the rehearsal process – they are simply his/her own interpretations and frequently change as the rehearsal process progresses.

Rehearsals

Rehearsals are still going well but I can feel time ticking away: anxiety levels are going through the roof! However, the ideas that Tim and Mark have about the way we’re going to do the play are becoming clearer as we continue working with the text and our characters. I don’t think it’ll really become very apparent until we’ve got the dancers - they start rehearsing on Monday of next week. Once the dancers arrive, I think things will start to come together nicely.

I’ve never worked on a play in this way before. We discuss the text a lot during rehearsals and Tim uses exercises and games to highlight what's important in the text, or ways of using the verse to really bring the meaning out of the lines. That's good because I’ve never been brilliant at text – sometimes I feel trapped by it: if you can get the meaning out of the line, why do you have to get stuck in text work? But when you hear someone speak text brilliantly, you can hear straightaway why a detailed exploration of Shakespeare's verse is so important. If you can actually get into the text, it frees you up as an actor.

Units

We finished the read-through and now we’re going through the play step-by-step to find points where the story changes, or where something important happens to make the characters go off in a different direction. Mark calls each of these sections a ‘unit’ and there are hundreds in the first scene with Miranda and Prospero alone. It begins with the storm; Miranda watches this terrible storm and sees the ship sink, and thinks everyone aboard is dead. All of a sudden, Prospero tells her not to worry about that – ‘I caused the storm but don’t worry, they’ll all be fine. I have to tell you secrets that I’ve kept from you for the past twelve years; they’re really important now because they involve the people who have just arrived on the island.’ Miranda's whole life changes in that scene; she thought she was the daughter of this man who lived in a cave on an island, then all of a sudden she's heir to the Duchy of Milan. That's a huge turning point for her right at the beginning. I mean, there are points all the way through… like when Caliban and the two clowns, Trinculo and Stephano, decide to kill Prospero [IV.i]. They get to his cell and they’re ready to murder him, but then Trinculo finds a heap of gorgeous clothes and they get completely side tracked. Caliban's still focused on the murder, but the others are much more interested in the clothes: it's far more interesting to try these on than it is to go kill Prospero!

Miranda

Alex and I worked on the Lovers’ scene too [III.i]. I realised for the first time today how young Miranda is, about thirteen or fourteen… she's naïve and innocent and beautiful, and she falls in love with Ferdinand. She's great to play, which is a relief: I was worried about that, because I’ve never played a woman before (I’ve played young children but never a girl). I didn’t know whether I could do it. Miranda is actually a lot of fun; there are moments when she's extremely wise and other times she's very naïve. She has a lot of range. For example, when Prospero reveals to her that she's heir to the Duchy of Milan, he gets carried away with the anger he feels towards his brother. She tempers his rant and stops him going over the top; I don’t think she even realises that she's a voice of reason. It's just in her nature. Prospero says

Mark his condition and th’event, then tell me
If this might be a brother
[I.ii.117-8]

Miranda replies that perfectly good mothers can have truly terrible sons. Goodness is nothing to do with the womb they grew in. It's to do with personality. She moderates his anger and kind of stops him getting lost within himself. On the other hand, she can be very naïve: I like the part where Prospero tells her ‘Your dad was the Duke of Milan,’ and she goes ‘My dad was the Duke of Milan? But aren’t you my dad?!’ He really has to spell it out: ‘Yes, I am, just listen to the story – what I’m saying is that I was the Duke of Milan.’

Voices

I haven’t consciously changed my voice for Miranda. Some things happen instinctively – my voice gets slightly lighter – but what we’re trying to do is keep the vocal shifts between characters as ambiguous as possible. We don’t really ‘put on’ voices. Maybe my accent gets a little bit thicker or my voice gets lower or my physicality changes slightly, but it isn’t as if I’m changing from a Newcastle Ariel to a London Trinculo… I’ll use different aspects of this voice rather than different accents. It helps with the crossover of characters played by the same person. I think that will be one of the most interesting aspects of this production, the fact that you’ve got one person playing all these characters and they’re not making obvious changes (urrgh! Now I’m Caliban, woorgh! Now I’m Ariel…). On top of that, the text is so good… Shakespeare distinguishes characters by the way they speak; differentiation is written into the text so you don’t really need accents or even different physicalities a lot of the time. We’ll find out how much differentiation we need to include as we get further into rehearsals.

Movement Group

We had a Movement session earlier in the week. The three of us walked around in a kind of train and we didn’t speak, we just walked around and took on the physicality of each character in turn – like a game of ‘follow-my-leader.’ We each took turns at being at the head of the train and did our own characters. It was very spontaneous, I hadn’t thought about how Ariel would move beforehand. What came out of the exercise was the idea that he moved like a bird – he watches a lot, his head movements are sharp, jerky, and his body is very free. I suppose that's because he's not bound by the limitations of a human body. After all, he's not a human being. But it's also quite difficult in terms of the ideas that Tim and Mark have about the production – it being one man and all in his head, and all the characters being different aspects of Prospero. If we’re all characters in someone's head, then I don’t suppose anybody is really bound by the physical limitations of being a human being. You can do anything! Having said that, I think Ariel's physically more exciting than the others...

Clothing

I had a costume fitting too. I’m wearing a Jacobean man's undershirt, which is long and doubles up as a dress for Miranda, although it's really a man's piece of clothing. I’ve got stockings and shoes as well (I’m not sure whether the shoes will stay). At the moment, the idea is that Prospero will come out in a costume at the beginning and Caliban and Ariel will wear bits of his costume throughout the play; again, that reinforces our being aspects of the same person. Prospero has the full gear on and I have his undershirt and his stockings and his shoes and his neck ruff, whilst Caliban has Prospero's under-shorts and a gabardine (a big leather coat), so we look like little bits of Prospero. It looks as if you splashed me and Caliban together, we would become Prospero. I think they’ve given me the undershirt for the practical reason that it's the most feminine piece of man's clothing, it hangs down so low… maybe you could also read the fact that Ariel and Caliban wear Prospero's undergarments as a suggestion that they’re the inner workings of Prospero.

It's lovely to be on the South Bank every day and the White Company starts next week – I can’t wait to meet everybody!

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Rehearsal Notes 3

These comments are the actor's thoughts or ideas about the part as s/he goes through the rehearsal process – they are simply his/her own interpretations and frequently change as the rehearsal process progresses.

Difficult week

When did I speak to you last? Thursday, so it's been a short week (we had Monday off) and a difficult week so far; the dancers arrived and we started standing up and doing scenes ‘off book’ yesterday. I hadn’t managed to learn as much as everyone else, so I went home and had a bit of a panic, but I’m feeling better today as I learnt the scenes and they went well. Suddenly I’ve realised just how much time we’re going to spend on stage; I’ll have to be interesting otherwise people are going to switch off fairly quickly! That's scary because the pressure is usually shared between more people.

Learning lines

I’ve never had a problem learning lines before, but running through yesterday's scenes I found I didn’t know them very well at all. I’ve got to go home every night and look at my lines otherwise they won’t all go in. It puts more pressure on, but hopefully the end result will be better because of the extra effort and focus. I suppose I learn my lines in quite an odd way; I read through to get a sense of the meaning in my own head (which often doesn’t sit with the pentameter or the line) then I repeat them back and it's often higgledy-piggledy, so I need to put it into some kind of sense after I’ve learnt it all. I repeat them again and again. That seems like a long way round and it is, but it's the only way that works for me!

Character work

We’re doing things like spinning or ducking down or jumping up to tackle the transitions between scenes where the characters usually flip over. That gives the scene an impetus and makes the change between characters very apparent, but it's a bit too general for a final solution. The characters need to become more detailed before we can go straight from one to the other with a greater specificity.

I got rather confused about the idea of Ariel as a base character and I talked to Tim [Carroll, Master of Play] about it. The main problem that I have at the moment is that I can’t see how the characters’ journeys link a lot of the time… I could do a spin and be Ariel and then spin out of it and be Miranda again, but I need to understand how different aspects of each character intersect. Finding a through-line for Trinculo has been easier than the others, Miranda and Ariel. At the beginning, Trinculo's scared of the storm then he finds Stephano, and after that the monster, Caliban, joins them and all Trinculo that really cares about is being with Stephano and being safe. He doesn’t care about murdering Prospero, but he is concerned that his position in relation to Stephano is higher than that of Caliban. That's basically his through-line throughout the whole play, to be safe.

Miranda is much more complicated – especially because she's a girl, and I feel that as a result a lot of the impulses that come to me as an actor are wrong. I feel as if I’m turning her into a drag queen… perhaps that's all right if you’re playing a different kind of female character, a big comedy character, but Miranda isn’t like that at all. I want her to be regal and serene, but right now she's too manly. I think approaching a female character is different in every way; the physicality's so different, the sensibility is so different. Miranda is the pure heart of the play and I want to do her justice. I know that she would have been played by a boy-actor in Shakespeare's time, but I’m finding the part tricky.

We worked on Act one, scene two yesterday. I found it really hard not to sound patronising when Miranda tells Caliban off:

Abhorred slave,
Which any print of goodness wilt not take,
Being capable of all ill!

[ll.352-55]

As a man playing a woman, my reaction is to try and fight back when Caliban gets rude … it just comes out as being, well, bourgeois – ‘ooh you naughty monster, stand back, how dare you speak to me?’ I want her to be perfect and she can’t be male in any way, that's the problem; she's so feminine and so pure, the exact opposite of Caliban. Ariel's doesn’t have that many male qualities either… so those are my problems to work on.

Games

Tim uses games to help actors find different things in the character's situation and the text. This week we sang and danced out the whole of the first Lords’ scene [II.i]. First of all, we had to sing the scene to each other in any style we wanted. We ended up with something like a sing-song opera: la LAH - la LAH - la LAH! Basically we were singing to the rhythm of the iambic pentameter. Immediately after that, Tim asked us to dance out the scene, and we said the lines on top of a dance move. I loved the dancing part; the impetus of using my body in a big way really helped some of the words come out. When I get nervous, I tend not to use my voice (sometimes in rehearsals I speak in quite a tiny voice), but when you’re dancing you can’t help but speak out loud! I stopped worrying about the sense of the line because the movement almost gives the sense and meaning of the line. For example, ‘She that is Queen of Tunis; she that dwells/ Ten leagues beyond man's life’ [II.i] – the movement to accompany ‘She that dwells ten leagues’ was a big run-and-jump from one side of the stage to the other, with a lot of arm-throwing, to represent the idea of space. I found it useful because you find the voice goes along with the movement.

Frozen pictures

We also did a tableaux game. Last time I mentioned that we broke the scenes down into units – that's what Mark [Rylance] calls them; we create little headers for each new thought or impetus that comes into each scene, like ‘Ferdinand gets led by the music’ [I.ii]. After we divided the whole play into units, we put some music on in the background and created tableaux, frozen pictures including all three of us. We made a picture for each unit and then put them together in a sequence for Tim. We changed pictures every five or ten seconds. That helped us get a sense of the whole play within ten minutes: you can see each situation: bang, bang, bang… and the through-line of the play.

Movement

We worked with Glynn [MacDonald, Master of Movement] this morning and looked at the physical archetypes (King, Warrior, Magician, Lover) in more detail. We’re going to look more closely at the way our characters might move, which is great as that means I can focus on Miranda and Ariel and Antonio… they’re the problem ones. I’m happy with Trinculo's physicality at the moment. He runs around and screams a lot, and throws his arms about, and pouts, and holds his nose when the monster gets near him. He's good fun because he's a clown but he gets hurt quite easily too. He tries to impress but he's actually scared most of the time.

Antonio is relatively straightforward as well; he's a Lord who got rid of his older brother, Prospero, so he could become the Duke of Milan – at the beginning of the play, he's the Duke of Milan and he's been shipwrecked on the island so that Prospero can have his revenge on him… he's a bit of a nasty piece of work. At least, he's certainly very ambitious. He's a much older character than me, so I have to find my own Antonio and a physicality to match. Alex [Hassell] is the same age as me and he's playing Gonzalo who's meant to be about seventy – the challenge will be making them into us.

Looking ahead

I’m in the third week of rehearsals which is always a hard time, for me anyway. I’m feeling a bit lost, but hopefully I’ll be a lot more confident by this time next week; I’ll have learnt most of my lines and I’ll feel more secure with the transitions from character to character.

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Rehearsal Notes 4

These comments are the actor's thoughts or ideas about the part as s/he goes through the rehearsal process – they are simply his/her own interpretations and frequently change as the rehearsal process progresses.

Running scenes

We ran almost half of the play yesterday. That's the most we’ve put together so far and the result was very confusing. Starting with the first Lords’ scene [II.i], we went into the first full Clown scene [II.i], through the Lovers’ scene [III.i] then into the second Clown scene [III.ii] and finished with the Harpy scene [III.iii]. Mark [Rylance, Prospero] calls that section ‘the Valley’ because of the symmetry in the structure: Lords/ Clowns/ Miranda/ Clowns/ Lords. The quick transitions between characters meant we got lost a few times – but even that's useful at this stage, because it helps you discover what doesn’t work in the wider context of the play. You might think of a certain set of moves looks great when you work on a scene in isolation, but when you run scenes together, the same moves don’t look right.

We’ve been trying different ways of working with the dancers in the scene where the clowns get very drunk. It worked really well when the dancers (as the Fates) manipulated us; we let our bodies go floppy and the dancers moved our arms and heads like puppets. That meant our words and movements came out all uncoordinated; the dancers weren’t familiar with the lines in the scene, so the gestures followed our lines after a slight delay. That came about quite naturally and gave the scene a very drunken feel. We kept banging into each other and flailing around as we tried to talk (I’m doing the actions right now but no one can see!).

The exciting thing we found during the run of scenes was that we could switch from the drunken clowns to the Lords [III.ii to III.iii] just by standing up independently. Character changes were apparent simply because the dancers were no longer controlling our movements. The same thing works in that drunken clowns’ scene [III.ii] when Ariel speaks for Trinculo. Ariel says ‘Thou liest’ in Trinculo's voice and gets him into trouble with Stephano; I have to shift between Trinculo and Ariel then back again several times. I found that I could just stand up on my own for Ariel's lines and immediately flop back into Trinculo. That gave a very clear indication that you’ve swapped characters without having to put on a hunchback or speak in a different voice. So that was great. Mark's very good at changing characters with simple things like that: for instance, when he goes to sleep as King Alonso, he rolls as he lies down and keeps on going to roll over his back, then back onto his feet and he carries on speaking as Sebastian. It's simple but really, really effective.

One of the questions came up as we worked on the drunken clowns’ scene was why does Ariel put Trinculo in a tizz and play around with him like that? The way we’re going with the play, Ariel isn’t really someone who makes trouble for the sake of it. He's not concerned about wasting time playing tricks on people; he just does these things at Prospero's command in order to get his freedom. I haven’t found an answer to that one yet.

Finding parallels

We had some discussions about whether the characters in the play remind us of anybody – people we know, or friends that we have, or characters in films that we’ve seen, or people who are in the public eye. For Antonio, we had someone like Saddam Hussein. I thought Miranda was quite like the blind girl in M. Night Shyamalan's film The Village. I chose that because of the setting of the film is a bit like The Tempest, in that the characters close themselves off and make their own island. It was harder to find parallels for Ariel and Caliban because they aren’t real people. I didn’t want to make Ariel a real person so my suggestions were George Orwell's Big Brother from the book 1984 because he's all-seeing and has a sort of limitless influence, and the internet because that has an enormous effect on people's lives without any emotional involvement. Like Ariel, it has influence without making judgements. But even so, it's difficult to pin Ariel down because he's not like any human, is he? Unless you make him like a superhero or a fairy. Anyway, those comparisons with real people or things really helped bring the characters to life for us; it made the characters much more real, rather than just being people on the page.

Antonio

As we’re playing characters that are somehow connected on a psychological level, I’ve been thinking about the relationship between Ariel and Antonio. Perhaps it's Ariel's responsibility to make Prospero face up to his own shortcomings and he uses or creates the character of Antonio to do that. Prospero needs to recognise that two wrongs don’t make a right. In order to be better than his brother Antonio, Prospero has to face and forgive his brother. It's like a festering wound; unless you deal with the wound, it won’t heal – it’ll just fester. You need to clean the wound and take out whatever's caused it, and although that's painful, the wound will be able to heal over and you can move on with your life.

Antonio's difficult because we only ever hear the story from Prospero's point of view – he basically tells Miranda in the first scene that his brother did a terrible thing and pushed them out to sea. But of course that's what you do when you tell somebody about an argument; if I came to you and said ‘I had an argument with so and so’, I’d tell you that I was super-calm and really nice and they were having a right go at me… That's all you ever hear from Prospero: ‘I really loved my brother and he was great, but he turned out to be an awful person.’ You never actually get to hear Antonio's side. Admittedly Antonio tries to convince Sebastian to kill his brother Alonso, but again, you could look at the reasons why he might be doing that… it might be in the best interests of Naples, or it might be in his own best interests. I don’t think he's straight-down-the-middle evil.

When Prospero describes what happened with Antonio, he makes his brother out to be a villain, but he describes his own retreat as well ‘I gave him over my estate whilst I went and read my books.’ I thought, well, you’re meant to be the Duke, why are you making your brother do all the hard work so you can just go and read your books? Prospero learnt about high works and art, but that's not his job. In my opinion, his job is to be the Duke of Milan and he's almost abdicated from that responsibility. I really don’t know yet how he fits into Prospero's consciousness – he's obviously a dark side but I think most of the characters are quite dark (the exceptions are probably Gonzalo and Miranda, and Ferdinand to a certain extent). Caliban and Ariel and Prospero himself – they all have sides which aren’t very nice. You can see that they’re little bits of someone's consciousness, little bits of someone's personality all splayed out. Antonio is part of that; he's something that Prospero has to deal with, some kind of problem.

What next

Everyone's learnt most of their lines now, which is great. You can play around a lot more if you don’t have to keep looking at your text. That's when rehearsals become really exciting; they’re never really exciting when someone's holding a script. Tim's going to let us go a bit early this afternoon so we can go and learn the final bits of our lines for Acts four and five.

I’m still struggling with Miranda; I keep worrying that I’m not acting anything like a girl! I’m either like a boy or a drag-queen. At the moment, when I try to do ‘feminine’, I feel go to crazy extremes… all of a sudden I’m some sexual predator fluttering her eyelids – not very Miranda really! But it's getting better slowly. Now I know the lines, it's much easier and as of next week I’ll actually be rehearsing in quite a lot of costume. I think that will help.

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Rehearsal Notes 5

These comments are the actor's thoughts or ideas about the part as s/he goes through the rehearsal process – they are simply his/her own interpretations and frequently change as the rehearsal process progresses.

This week

We’ve gone all the way through the play and everyone seems to be off book or off book-ish. I think it gets better every time we do it! I tried my costume on this week too – it's fabulous, a Jacobean man's undershirt which basically looks like a woman's nightgown: very long and white with beautiful black embroidery on it. Then I’ve got a ruff around my neck and silk stockings and shoes. We’ve worked out a whole routine for Trinculo and Caliban underneath the gabardine [II.ii] – heads pop out from places and arms flail and heads are pushed into parts where they shouldn’t be – and it's really funny to do but the ruff might get in the way a bit. We’ll see how it goes in technical rehearsals.

I was bothered about being too manly as Miranda, but the costume is so feminine and so beautiful that I feel as if I can just sit the language on top of that image; I don’t need to do anything with my physicality, I can just be. Characters like Trinculo are so big and camp and over-the-top that being very simple as Miranda seems to make the character so much more feminine.

I’d also worried about playing Antonio as a kind of generic ‘evil man’. Obviously he's not like that, but I’ve stopped worrying because I think people will endow us with any character they want to: at some points there are so many shifts between characters that there's no way an audience can pinpoint us. I just need to play the thoughts and lines for the truth rather than thinking ‘Antonio's posh’ or ‘Antonio is big and strong.’ Ultimately, Antonio is me: if I’m playing Antonio then he's me. So I’ve stopped worrying about that too!

The play has started to feel really short – it's very weird. The part of Ariel/ Trinculo/ Antonio/ Miranda feels massive because there's so much to learn, but each character within that only has a couple of scenes really: Ariel only has a couple of scenes, although he pops up in other people's scenes (‘Ooh, hello’) and then disappears again. Miranda has a couple of scenes… Trinculo's probably my biggest character, which I wouldn’t have expected at the beginning. As far as parts go, it feels like Trinculo and Antonio are bigger than Ariel and Miranda, but Ariel and Miranda are more constant characters because you’re reminded of them throughout the play.

Character traits

We’re finding out more about the differences between Ariel and Caliban. Ariel just wants to be free. He doesn’t really have emotions or feelings about what he does for Prospero: in our production, he just does it to get freedom. That doesn’t mean he has feelings about being free – being free won’t make him happy. He keeps asking when Prospero will free him because Prospero has said ‘I’m going to free you’ and then it doesn’t happen… it keeps getting pushed back, Prospero keeps saying ‘I just need you for a few more hours,’ and Ariel thinks that's strange. On the other hand, Caliban doesn’t want freedom (the way we’re playing it): he wants to serve someone and to be appreciated for serving someone. Stephano gives Caliban drink [II.ii] and then Caliban offers to serve him – there's a kind of give and take there. Later Caliban offers to show Stephano the best springs and to get him fish and berries and wood

I’ll show thee the best springs; I’ll pluck thee berries;
I’ll fish for thee, and get thee wood enough.
[II.ii]

It's just like the way he served Prospero in the beginning: Prospero was kind to him and in return Caliban showed him all the qualities of the island

The fresh springs, brine-pits, barren place and fertile.
[I.ii]

Character alignment with the dancers and singers is also becoming clearer. The dancers are part of Caliban's world, and the singers are really part of Ariel's world. In this production, we’ve got six trained opera singers who are just brilliant, and they sing all of Ariel's songs. They’re really part of Ariel world and they sit in a pyramid formation on the Musician's balcony above the stage. In terms of the theatre, they’re near the heavens, and in terms of the human body, the singers are up where the brain or the imagination would be: as the dancers come from the pit at the beginning and are linked with Caliban and the earth, the singers are part of the imagination which is what Ariel is, really.

The singers are also great because they can add atmosphere or underscore the text in a way that makes the lines sound even more beautiful. Those six voices can basically make anything exciting; like the dancers, the singers can give scenes a special quality. It's as if all of a sudden something different is happening.

Targeting the verse

Mark [Rylance, Prospero] was at the Meet and Greet for another Company early this week, so we did some individual work with Giles [Block, Master of the Words]. We did a thing called ‘targeting’ the play, where you take each thought in a speech and give it a verb; the verb is what you’re trying to do to the person you’re speaking to – how you’re trying to make that person feel – with that particular thought. So for example if you were angry with them, you might try to ‘hit’ them with a particular thought or if you’re comforting them the verb might be to ‘stroke’ or ‘massage’ them. It's really useful because it makes you focus on why you’re speaking: people always speak for a reason, to affect someone or something. We worked on Miranda's opening bits with Prospero, when she's just seen the ship sink in the tempest [I.i], and then we did the Ferdinand and Miranda love scene where he carries the logs. My first lines in that scene are:

Alas, now pray you
Work not so hard! I would the lightning had
Burnt up those logs that you are enjoined to pile!
[III.i]

So for that first thought [highlighted], she's obviously saying ‘Don’t work so hard’, and the verb we chose was ‘seduces’ or ‘befriends’, because that's what she's trying to do to Ferdinand. The verb for the next thought [underlined] was ‘Chastises’, so that particular thought was aimed at the logs. And that's what you do for each section. Give it a word, it's good.

Harpy

We’ve done some bits of the Harpy scene today with the singers, as they underscore most of the Harpy speech [III.iii]. It's one of the more exciting bits, and one of the bits that I really enjoy doing. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before, but the fourth member of our cast is a rope which hangs down from the heavens in middle of the stage – Sian [Williams, Master of Dance] came up with this image of the thread of life as manipulated by the Fates – and it gets used a lot in different parts of the show. In the Harpy scene, there's a sort of noose tied at the end that Mark puts over his head and then I climb the rope behind him and hang at the top whilst he spins around the stage. It looks like I’m spinning him on the end of the rope. Visually, I think it will be fabulous on stage.

Another brilliant idea, Tim's brilliant idea actually, was for the vanishing banquet in the Harpy scene. In IV.iv, there's this odd stage direction ‘with a quaint device the banquet vanishes’ and the idea is that the dancers will come through the pit dressed as the people who sell chocolate and drinks and lay the ‘banquet’ trays on the edge of the stage then disappear into the crowd with the trays again. That's another very simple idea that we’re hoping the audience will really enjoy.

Jig

Today we’re looking at the end of the play and learning the jig, the dance that ends the play. We’ve been learning the dance with Sian [Williams, Master of Dance] who breaks down the steps into manageable bits and teaches us that way, but I’m still pretty bad at it and the other two are amazing. My excuse is that they’ve done it before! Mark showed me a clever trick whereby you step to one side and motion to the other person so it looks like they’re doing a solo – if you forget your steps, you can just do that and then the other person is left in the middle of the stage jigging on their own. I’ll be using that quite a lot! The dance is fantastic though – it ties in with the masque, when Ferdinand and Miranda are blessed by the three goddesses. We do the same dance with them that we do at the end, so it ties in nicely with the wedding.

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Rehearsal Notes 6

These comments are the actor's thoughts or ideas about the part as s/he goes through the rehearsal process – they are simply his/her own interpretations and frequently change as the rehearsal process progresses.

Starting Technical rehearsals

I’ve had a brilliant week – but today I’ve started to get really nervous. We’ve gone right back through the play and we did our first run. That was very scary because there are still moments when some of my lines just disappear – shwwt – and you can’t really improvise Shakespeare! But on the whole it went really well; we got through it without getting lost or taking a break (we weren’t sure if we’d manage the whole two hours). Now we’re starting to work out technical things like where the singers will come in and we’ve been working on stage with the dancers too; really we’re just waiting to get on stage and do it.

One of my problems with Shakespeare is my accent – I’m from Yorkshire but I think I try to do ‘Received Pronunciation’ a lot, although I don’t think that's necessarily the best way to speak Shakespeare. The language sounds beautiful in RP if you’re naturally an RP speaker, but it's just as beautiful spoken with an accent. What I’m finding difficult is speaking with an accent when everyone else is speaking RP (Mark [Rylance] and Alex [Hassell] are both naturally RP speakers). Sometimes I think the language sounds clumsy in my accent, which it doesn’t, but I’ve found myself slipping into RP… I keep telling myself ‘Stop it!’ Trinculo's got a very northern accent and the lines sound great, but Antonio and Miranda and Ariel tend to slip into RP.

Transfer from rehearsal room to stage

The shape of the stage is taped out on the floor of IJ3 [rehearsal room at the Globe] and two big pillars made out of wood, so we’re very familiar with the shape of the stage and we can use the pillars as part of the scenes. That should make the transfer from rehearsal room to the stage easier; in terms of movement, I don’t think it will be any different when we get onstage.

In terms of Voice, though, the Globe is a different kettle of fish. The rehearsal room is quite an intimate space; if you had volume levels 1 through 10, 1 being very quiet and 10 being very loud, you can speak at level 3 or 4 in the rehearsal room. That's the level you normally talk at, unless you get angry or shout. As soon as you get on stage, you have to start projecting: the Globe is open and big and there can be all kinds of noise from outside too, like planes and helicopters. Some of the little nuances at level 3 that you might have used in the rehearsal room don’t sound as convincing if you’re pushing the voice out. I don’t know… it's going to be difficult but part of the challenge of playing the space is moving the language onto that stage and finding a way of playing it that has truth in it, rather than just concentrating on being heard. That's quite easy to slip into – I know I do that sometimes; if I think I can’t be heard I JUST DO IT GENERALLY THIS LOUD AND CLIPPED SO THAT EVERYBODY KNOWS WHAT I’M SAYING, but it has no thought or truth behind it. That's one of the things I’m really nervous about, but it's going to be fine – I’m sure it will be something that you learn to gauge with practice.

Audience

Tour groups come into the theatre whilst we’re rehearsing, so although I can’t imagine what it's going to be like full of people (apart from very nerve-wracking), I got a sense of what it's like just to have some people listening to you in that space. And it's amazing the way they do listen. In any other theatre – whatever the kind of stage – you can’t see the audience because they’re usually blacked out (unless it's a choice of the production to leave the auditorium lit up). But at the Globe, you can see everybody and they can see you: there isn’t stage lighting, just natural light and special lights that recreate that for the evening performances. It's everybody's space and the people who come to watch a play are much more a part of the production and a part of the words – I saw Twelfth Night here a couple of years ago and as a member of the audience, you really feel part of the company and part of the play. That's more exciting and challenging for an actor and it's far more exciting for an audience because they’re involved in such a direct way: you look up off the stage at people and you meet their eyes.

We had an open technical rehearsal too – it's the first time the Globe has done that. People bought tickets to come and watch a bit of the technical rehearsal from the upper gallery. It was great. I actually forgot they were there after a little bit, I was concentrating on getting through the scene! At first we were playing to the crowd and shaking our tails a bit, but things soon calmed down and it was lovely to have an appreciative audience. We did a scene with the Clowns, the Lovers’ scene where Ferdinand carries the logs (the dancers, in our production) [III.i] and then the Ariel-turning-into-a-harpy scene [III.iii] when I climb up the rope behind Prospero and hang there ‘You are three men of sin…’ whilst he runs around at the end of the rope. Actually he's stopped running around now, so you just get a really clear image of me hanging over him.

It's difficult to say how the audience found the scenes and the shifts between characters: they watched things out of context and I think it would be very confusing if you came into the play halfway through. I mean, they laughed at things that are obviously funny, like Trinculo and Caliban under the gabardine, but that's not dependent on character… we won’t really know what the audience reaction will be like until we do it.

Coming together

Things seem to be coming together quite nicely. We’re going to do a dress rehearsal tonight; it's all there really, it just needs to come together a bit. I’m sure it will. For me, that really means Miranda and Ariel's entrances in Act one. I find Miranda's first entrance tricky – in opening scene she doesn’t do very much, although she's in a heightened state and having a bit of a wail about the shipwreck. Basically she stands there whilst Prospero tells her what happened twelve years ago; I have little one-line interjections (‘Alack’, ‘Alack’, ‘O the heavens!’) which are quite hard because this is a story where she's told that ‘You’re a princess’ and whilst she's got all these exclamations, it seems like she's not listening. Prospero keeps saying ‘Listen to me!’ – ‘Thou attend’st not!’, ‘Dost thou hear?’ [I.ii].

So Miranda's told she's a princess, huge news, and then her attention wanders?! In our production, Mark's done a very clever thing in the opening act, using the chess pieces on a chessboard to create the shipwreck [I.i] and he uses the same pieces to introduce each character to Miranda as they come up in his story – he uses a chess piece to introduce Antonio at the line ‘My brother and thy uncle, call’d Antonio’ [I.ii]. The way I’m playing it the moment, Miranda gets absorbed with the chesspieces: I’ve never seen anybody else in my life apart from my dad and Caliban, so I get very interested – I want to know who they are, but Prospero's trying to tell me about Antonio. That's how that works, but it's tricky to move between the interjections and an absorption in something else. We’ll just have to see how it goes…

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Rehearsal Notes 7

These comments are the actor's thoughts or ideas about the part as s/he goes through the rehearsal process – they are simply his/her own interpretations and frequently change as the rehearsal process progresses.

First performance

It's happened now, hasn’t it? We’ve done five shows so far and I’m about to do my sixth. I’ve never ever been as nervous as I was before our first show. It's very frightening to look through the grilles and see all those people standing there… I was a bit like a rabbit in the headlights, but it's such a buzz to play with them and the cheering at the end was incredible. I’ve never played in a theatre where you can interact so closely with the audience – it's not just that you can see everybody and they can see you; you share a communal space and they’re very much part of the story. I’m becoming more and more comfortable with that aspect of the space, although I had a bit of a panic day yesterday and thought everything I was doing was bad. Tim [Carroll], our director, pretty much told me to stop worrying and just do it! There's only so much you can do once a show has opened; you can tinker with bits and pieces but you can’t become a different character (and you had six weeks of rehearsal to work out characterisation). All you can do is go out and do your best. If people like you, they like you – and if they don’t, you have to accept it. If there wasn’t any fear involved, acting wouldn’t be as much fun.

Audience reaction

Apparently ‘first preview’ audiences here often include a lot of ‘Friends of the Globe’, but several people mentioned that the audience for our first show was more representative of a ‘normal’ Globe audience (if there is such a thing!); we had school groups and foreign students which helped to create a great energy. They seemed to really go for it! There's a certain amount of audience appreciation for the enthusiasm and joy with which it's played; when actors put in 100%, people are more willing to give a lot back and to be led wherever the actors take them.

I can’t say how easily the audience followed the story and picked up the changes of character because I haven’t really spoken with anybody who's seen it. They responded in a very engaged way. I know that, as an actor in the production, I enjoy playing each moment so it doesn’t matter if I get lost at points within the whole. Hopefully people in the audience can enjoy the experience as a series of moments too. I’ve begun to realise that this isn’t the kind of production where each actor must have a through-line from start to finish, as it's more like a series of moments or scenes that come together. People can take from that what they will.

The audience get to know some characters more easily than others. Miranda and Trinculo have several long scenes in succession, we get to know them and see their journey through a scene. My Trinculo has a Northern accent and they can immediately click on to that too, although we didn’t set out to define characters using accents (Trinculo has always spoken like that). On the other hand, a character like Antonio has one scene and then pops up in another scene where he has one line! We see him plot the murder of Alonso with Sebastian [II.i] and then he disappears – in our play, you don’t see him again because we’re playing different characters. When he does pop up for his one line, I think it's tricky for the audience to recognise him: ‘Oh, wait a minute, who was that? Antonio?’ I have to work harder to help them make that connection.

Continued rehearsals and changes

At the moment, we rehearse in the day and perform in the evening from 7.30pm. I’m quite tired! During rehearsals, we try to make the scenes sharper and more focussed, so that means making lots of little changes. Yesterday we worked on the opening; originally Alex [Caliban] and I burst straight on and I went straight downstage as Miranda. Now I come on as Ariel and choose to become Miranda. That's difficult to play but it makes sense in terms of setting up the opposition between Ariel and Caliban as aspects of Prospero's psyche. We also cut my boatswain bits – we didn’t need them (although I quite liked the boatswain!) Now Mark [Prospero] plays the boatswain as part of the storm on the chessboard. Lots of little bits have been cut all over the place: we’ve lost nearly twenty minutes since the first performance. The aim is to get as close as we can to two hours. Each performance brings its own changes too; one of us might decide to say something in a slightly different way, and that influences the other characters’ reactions.

Turning lines out

Today we’ve been looking at lines we could turn out to include the audience. The theatre's difficult in terms of audibility – I have to project quite a lot – so Tim suggested that we might want to try playing some of the lines that are difficult to hear out to the audience as asides. Not everything of course, just certain lines. As Miranda I say:

Why speaks my father so ungently? This
Is the third man that e’er I saw, the first
That e’er I sigh’d for. Pity move my father
To be inclin’d my way!
[I.ii]

I had been addressing Prospero: ‘Why are you speaking so ungently?’ Tim asked me to try turning it out to the audience; Miranda is asking them a question ‘Why speaks my father so ungently?’ It works – that's why he's the director! Alex has started to play a lot out to the audience as Caliban as well, which is great because I think that interaction between the actors and the audience is what the Globe is about.

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Rehearsal Notes 8

These comments are the actor's thoughts or ideas about the part as s/he goes through the rehearsal process – they are simply his/her own interpretations and frequently change as the rehearsal process progresses.

Previews

We’ve had our Previews and our Press night; we’re only doing a few performances at the moment because Pericles has just opened, and we’ll be doing even fewer shows as we get into more of a rep season with The Winter's Tale. We rehearsed all day every day before evening performances during the Previews, just refining scenes and making changes. One of the scenes that's changed a lot is Act 3, scene 3, when the banquet appears in front of the lords. Initially the dancers walked through the yard with trays of food that they put on stage. Now we get pots of food like the ones you can buy on the piazza and plant them at the edge of the stage then use the audience as the islanders: we suddenly see 1500 people all around us. Alex as Gonzalo refers to them directly as ‘such islanders’ of ‘monstrous shape.’ He basically calls them ugly and they seem to love it! When he gets to the line about ‘gentle manners,’ he picks up one of the pots and it looks like he's stealing it from someone in the audience. I think the audience definitely feel more involved in the scene.

Every day there are little changes. Because the Globe audience is so present, their energy can really change a show: if an audience is very giving, you tend to experiment more. For example, last night Alex tried some different things as Ferdinand and it meant I didn’t fall in love with him at all! When Prospero says to Ferdinand ‘Take my daughter,’ Alex clapped his hands and rubbed them together, so it looked like I was a feast that he was about to tuck into (he claims he didn’t mean it to come out like that!). The whole relationship between Miranda and Ferdinand changed because he clapped his hands together; Miranda became quite coy instead of being completely love-struck. It's as if she was thinking ‘What?! Who does this man think he is?’ The Trinculo scenes tend to change almost every night; they feel very flexible. I’ve added in one or two lines of my own. Tim [Master of Play] says that's OK in prose scenes as long as you don’t do it too much. To be honest, the lines Shakespeare wrote in those scenes are so silly that unless people know the play very well, nobody really notices that I’ve added ‘It's more like a baby eel’ after ‘A man or a fish?’ when I’m feeling around under the gabardine. If they do know the play, they like things being added in – it's alive. I think that's the kind of thing that comes out of playing in front of an audience.

Other things… after bothering about my voice sounding too gruff, Miranda's voice drops very low when she says her name for the first time in the Lovers’ scene. I think that was one of the things I did to stop worrying - I did it for the first time to make Alex laugh during a dress rehearsal! It worked and we kept it in, so my dulcet tones have got lower and lower. It brings the play back to the reality that three men are playing all the parts, rather than a boy pretending to be a girl with a high voice. All of a sudden it acknowledges that men play those parts and it's not real, which releases the audience in a way and also makes them more affectionate towards Miranda, I think. She's got a sense of humour that brings them on-side. That's one of my favourite bits of the play.

Responses

I think the audience do follow our character changes. I think of the play as a series of moments and scenes: you don’t have to understand every little bit of each one. I know I don’t understand every little bit of Shakespeare that I’ve seen… it's impossible. Even if you’re seeing a play for the tenth time, there are bits of a production that will go over your head. You have to take from it what you want to take from it, and I think that's what the majority of people who come to see The Tempest do. One of the wonderful things about the Globe is that it's the kind of theatre that allows you to move out and come back in if you want to.

Kathryn Hunter, Master of Play for Pericles, came to see a performance the other day. She's an incredible actor and director who's worked at the Globe a lot. She loved the show and this makes you feel great; you know that you’re doing something right somewhere. One of her comments was that we used the whole stage; often the tendency is to push forward but Mark and Tim were very aware of the depth of the stage in rehearsals, and they encouraged Alex and me to use the sides and all four corners as well. The Globe is deceptive in that it feels like a natural proscenium arch when you’re on stage, because the two pillars mean you tend to push forward and play out front. But Tim and Mark helped us think about the whole space and now it just feels like a big playground.

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Ask Your Actor Bulletin

This bulletin was composed with questions sent in by schools who adopted Edward.

How did you learn the lines for four different characters?

Learning lines isn’t something I struggle with (touch wood!), and learning lines for four characters is just the same as learning lines for one character, except it takes longer. I find they’re much easier to remember once you start moving: fitting words to a movement helps them stick. I don’t come into rehearsals with all my lines learnt – I do it as I’m pretending to be someone else. And once you’ve learnt them, they don’t go out of your head even if you only say them for one or two shows a week.

How do you interpret Ariel's relationship with Prospero?

I don’t think it's healthy. Ariel doesn’t want to be Prospero's slave, so their relationship is strained though polite… there's a strange closeness between the two of them, although I think that's to do with familiarity rather than love. I’m not sure Ariel can feel love, whereas Prospero seems very needy – he needs Ariel in one way or another all through the play. Ariel just wants freedom, and it's only when Ariel is freed that Prospero is finally able to be free himself. In our production, Ariel and Caliban are also aspects of Prospero's psyche. Ariel is his imagination and intellect, opposing Caliban's base sensuality. Prospero can only become a fully realized person when he acknowledges his ‘Caliban’ side and allows his ‘Ariel’ side to be free – so Ariel, Prospero and Caliban share a kind of psychological relationship too.

How do you change your body movements and posture for comic scenes with Trinculo?

I become incredibly camp. I dip my hand and hold my undershirt in a way, and wear my bottle of liquor like a handbag. I hold my nose when I get near the monster and run round in a tizz and shriek a lot!

How do you make Trinculo scenes funny for a modern audience?

Make it lewd and crude, really! Well, we’re playing what's in the text (mostly) and it seems to get really big laughs. Sometimes comic relief in Shakespeare can seem a bit painful but I think these scenes are made for clowning so if you throw yourself into them and enjoy it, then the audience will probably enjoy it too.

Do you find there's any difference in Shakespeare's interpretation of women?

Miranda is the first female character I’ve played, so general comparisons are difficult. Some of my friends asked why I chose to come on crying as Miranda… it's not that she's a wimp, but she is a compassionate person who's very gentle and sensitive, so it's upsetting for her to watch the ship wrecked at the beginning. I don’t quite know how people imagine a ‘strong’ Miranda: she's not written as a masculine woman – she's written as being very feminine.

Do you still get nervous?

No, I don’t really get nervous now. We’ve done a lot of performances and that helps me feel confident – so I get excited rather than scared. But if someone I know comes into see the show, I do get a little bit nervous…

What is it like on stage when the people in the yard are so close and the crowd makes a lot of noise?

Actually it's nice to have groundlings so close to the stage. When we first started doing the play, it was quite scary and sometimes I found the noise distracting, but now I really like the fact that the audience are so present. I like that people are allowed to talk or move around or have a drink from cans that go ppphhhhsshhhhttt! Because they’re so close and we can see them, we can talk to them and sometimes they talk back to us. A few nights ago, when Miranda asked Ferdinand ‘Do you love me?’ someone in the audience shouted out ‘Yes!’ That level of involvement is fantastic – it's a bit like pantomime, which is great for anyone who wants to show off! But people in the audience don’t need to shout out to ‘talk back’ – even if you just make eye contact, it feels like you’ve had a conversation.

Which is your favourite scene and why?

Trinculo's scenes used to be my favourites, but now it's the scenes where I play Antonio because lines are very modern. Although it's all in verse, I can understand everything – there's not so much ‘riddle me this,’ it's two men having a conversation. Although there are words that we don’t use anymore, it's still pretty straightforward. I like getting into a conversational mode because feels very natural and helps you relax.

What's the hardest character to play?

I think Ariel is the trickiest character I play. It's difficult to get the essence of him; you can play him a million different ways. In rehearsals we tried to find parallels between the characters and people in real life – do they remind us of people we know, friends that we have, characters in films that we’ve seen, or people in the public eye? It was hardest to find parallels for Ariel and Caliban because they aren’t real people. My suggestions for Ariel were George Orwell's ‘Big Brother’ from the book 1984 (because he's all-seeing and has a sort of limitless influence), and the internet (because that has an enormous effect on people's lives without any emotional involvement). It's difficult to pin Ariel down because he's not like any human, is he? Unless you make him like a superhero or a fairy. But making those comparisons with real people and things really helped.

Have you found the right voice for Miranda?

I think I’ve found the right voice for my Miranda, after worrying that I sounded too manly. Miranda's voice drops very low when she tells Ferdinand her name (he's carrying the logs and she tries to help him; when he asks her name, I flex my muscles and say ‘Miranda’!). It was one of the things I did to stop worrying about it… the first time I did it was in a dress rehearsal to make Alex (who plays Ferdinand) laugh! It worked so we kept it in – my dulcet tones have got lower and lower!

It brings the play back to the reality of three men are playing all the parts, rather than me, a boy, trying to be a girl with a high voice (although my normal voice isn’t very deep). All of a sudden it acknowledges that men play the parts and what happens on stage isn’t real. That releases the audience in a way, and it also makes them more affectionate towards Miranda because it shows she's got a sense of humour. That's one of my favourite bits of the play.

How do you feel about playing four characters?

Very good; it's a very exciting opportunity. Especially because, in this production, we don’t change costumes and pretend to be a different person each time – we use our voices and bodies to distinguish one character from another and we can shift between characters very quickly, just by rolling over or standing in a certain way. We didn’t want to do hugely different accents or different physicalities (although Trinculo always had a Northern accent); we wanted to play with the ambiguity of those character shifts. I think it's fantastic.

Is working for the Globe a big step for you?

It is. As an actor you have to take a big risk: there's no scenery or lighting to hide behind, and you can see the whole audience. They’re part of the action, like another character in the play who can comment on what you’re doing and what's happening. For instance, I was on stage as Miranda the other night and when I asked Ferdinand ‘Do you love me?’ someone in the audience shouted ‘Yes!’ So there's a very special relationship between the actor and the audience in that space. It's a bit scary at first but that immediacy makes it so much more exciting to play. I’ve never worked in a theatre where you get to interact with the audience in that way before!

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